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What do you get for a piece of glass that's worth almost as much (if not more) than the camera it's mounted on? Olympus categorises this as a premium prime lens, ideal for high-speed sports photography, stage, fashion and portrait photography.

This lens simply exudes quality. The metallic exterior and general appearance make this lens feel very much worth its AU$999 asking price.

With no external switches, focusing selections for automatic or manual need to be chosen from within the camera's menu system. The Olympus MSC (movie and still compatible) system, as found on a number of other lenses, ensures that autofocusing is smooth and quiet. The focusing ring moves accurately and freely, but with enough resistance to ensure that the photographer doesn't over or under focus too extremely when shooting in manual focus. The lens has a 58mm non-rotating filter thread.

As it's designed on the Micro Four Thirds format, this means that the lens can be used with any Panasonic G-series or Olympus Pen/OM-D camera. In conjunction with the OM-D E-M5, this lens delivers excellent results. The only issue may be its lack of weather-proofing, which could limit its appeal to OM-D users who want to keep it attached to the body at all times.

The usefulness of a 75mm prime lens on a Micro Four Thirds camera is also debatable. With a 2x crop factor, it's equivalent to the field of view provided by a 150mm lens on a full-frame camera — a far cry from the "traditional" portrait photography primes in the region of 85mm.

That said, we were able to take some lovely looking portraits with this lens, even if it did mean stepping back a fair way from the subject to get them focused in the frame. While the lens is targeted toward portrait photographers, we found it ideal as a lens for some more covert street photography situations.

The minimum focusing distance of 84cm means that this lens is not really suited to any sort of close-up or macro work, though we're pretty sure that if you're investing close to AU$1000 on this lens, you'll be aware of that limitation.

Lexy got her first taste of all things tech at an early age, playing long spells of Ski Free during the glory days of Windows 3.1. Originally from CNET's Sydney office, she now calls San Francisco home.
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